Senate Greek politics thread

Heh, I was coming here to congratulate you.

 

Cool thread idea. I like reading about this kind of stuff.

 

LAJ_FETT Thanks heaps!

JoinTheSchwarz I'm told Podemos are beyond themselves with happiness (or so it appears on Twitter at least.) What's your opinion of them? Also, I found out today that both Spain and Portugal are having elections by the end of the year? 2015 is going to be interesting.


I Are The Internets Thanks

The Athens Stock Exchange finally closed with losses of only 3.91%. I don't quite understand how these things work, but I'm pretty sure someone made a lot of money in those 3 hours.

 

Are protests still going on?

 

Not massive protests like in 2011, if that's what you're referring to, but there are several small protests every day. It's usually sector-based, e.g. yesterday it was the union of employees of the printing industry, but it can also be more political -- yesterday again there were also people protesting against type C prisons and something about migrant rights (that's in Athens, there were probably things going on in other cities as well.)

There have been only two big demos these past two months: the anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising on 17 November and the anniversary of the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos on 6 December. I was in the November march and the police was incredibly brutal -- which I think is the reason we don't get so many protests anymore. People have just had more than their fare share of tear gas since 2010.

 

Chyntuck: Podemos have always aligned themselves with SYRIZA so yeah, they are probably ecstatic. I'm kind of wary about them, myself. Although I agree with their ideas and with a large percentage of their electoral program, it's slowly marginalized the most traditional left and has kind of become a cult of personality around Iglesias. Plus they are kind of avoiding any kind of controversy to preserve their currently immaculate image, so they are playing things worryingly safe. Still, they might probably get my vote. It's the only option I can see myself supporting.

 

How exactly does the Macedonia issue play out domestically? From what I can gather from a quick look at Wikipedia, it seems similar to the issue of Kurdistan, where you've got a "historical Macedonia" that overlaps geographically with the modern state of Greece...so I guess that means that having an actual country named "Macedonia" seems threatening?

 

It's official. Parliament is being dissolved and elections will take place on 25 January. I just heard the news on TV (a private, pro-austerity channel) and it's a 2012 redux. "If SYRIZA win, we'll go back to the drachma, you'll lose your savings because banks will go bust," etc.

Samaras was positively obnoxious in his meeting with the president of the republic. He repeated again that "these are elections that the Greek people didn't want" and spoke of the "security and stability of the nation" and the "need to protect the homeland." He seems to have forgotten (provided that he ever knew it) that he's the prime minister of a state, not a nation.

JoinTheSchwarz I can see your point about "worryingly safe", that's what SYRIZA are doing too -- which, for a party that has "radical left" in its name, is kind of ironic. I'm obviously going to vote for them because there's really nobody else but I wish that in such a critical situation I could believe in the people I'm voting for. Still, it's the first time in my life I'll be voting for the future government. Baby steps...

Alpha-Red Macedonia is different from Kurdistan in that it is a historically-defined region but it doesn't really match with an ethnic group, at least not anymore. Formerly Yugoslav Macedonia has a Slavic population who speak a distinct dialect of Bulgarian, Bulgarian Macedonia has a majority-Bulgarian population (as far as I know) and Greek Macedonians are now considered ethnic Greeks (I say "now" because there used to be a Slavic population there that was forcibly hellenised in the early 20th century -- forcibly but efficiently, so you won't find many people who consider themselves "Macedonians" anymore.) The Macedonia issue as it currently stands has to do with raw nationalism on both sides of the border. There is a legitimate argument that having a country named "Macedonia" would seem threatening, especially here in the Balkans and especially back in 1993 when there was the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia. However, the context in Greece at the time also included a first, massive wave of Albanian immigration that was a shock for Greek society, years of political instability and an economic crisis with very high inflation, so it was an ideal situation for nationalist discourse to flourish, and the key argument of Samaras and people like him at the time was that "Macedonia has always been Greek, blah blah, Alexander the Great, blah blah, our glorious ancestors, blah blah." On the Yugoslav side, you had a tiny, newly independent country that needed to assert its independence from the larger countries born of the breakup of Yugoslavia, especially Serbia, which was very aggressive at the time. To achieve that the Macedonian leadership elected to build a clear national identity, so they also went bananas about Alexander the Great (if you go to Skopje you'll be amazed at the number of statues of Alexander the Great all over the place) and started talking about their glorious ancestors, the occupied provinces of Macedonia in Greece and Bulgaria and whatnot. Then there were massive demonstrations in both countries and it all went haywire. It was very ridiculous and it's unfortunately keeping diplomats busy to this day. I personally believe that a name such as "Northern Macedonia" would be perfectly reasonable both in political and historical terms, and I think that's what was being suggested when the last round of negotiations broke down, but (if I remember correctly) it was rejected by both sides, because FYROM wouldn't settle for anything less than "Macedonia" plain and simple, while Greece wouldn't accept anything with the word "Macedonia" in it.

(PS: If anyone who disagrees is reading the above, please take it easy on the bickering -- this is a very short summary of a very complicated issue and I know it's full of approximations.)

 

Well, the election campaign kicked off -- New Democracy broadcast their first election spots minutes after prime minister/president meeting, and their people are repeating all day on TV "SYRIZA - bankruptcy - drachma - disaster." However, when SYRIZA asked for a televised Samaras-Tsipras debate, ND refused flatly.

Meanwhile, here's some smart analysis for those who are interested:

How snap elections in Greece fit into Samaras's strategy by Nick Malkoutzis (a centrist political commentator, based in Athens)

Will Snap Elections Bring Greece’s Syriza to Power? by Maria Margaronis (a left-wing Greek-British journalist, based in London)

A clever commentary on issues with SYRIZA's platform from a radical left-wing perspective, by Nantina Vgontza (I'm not sure what she does for a living but I believe she's American Greek).

 

Greek political surrealism in full swing today: former prime minister George Papandreou broke away from PASOK and founded his own party to compete in the elections.

This is a big deal in more ways than one. First of all, a former prime minister breaking away from his "original" party is unheard of. Second, George Papandreou isn't just any former PASOK chairman and prime minister, he's the son of Andreas Papandreou, the founder of PASOK and prime minister from 1981-1988 and 1993-1996. So you could say he's abandoning his family heirloom. Third, quite a few prominent PASOK politicians seem to be following him -- and that says a lot about how hated the current chairman of PASOK, Evangelos Venizelos, must be (which, I may add, is entirely understandable; the man is a lunatic autocrat, check out how politely he answered a voter's question in this video from 00:46 onwards.)

On the other hand, this is entirely surreal because PASOK is currently polling at 4-6% (with the usual caveat "if opinion polls are to be believed") so splitting that vote might mean that neither of the two parties reaches the 3% threshold that is required to enter parliament. The Financial Times seem to believe that Papandreou has enough aura to attract voters not only from PASOK, but also from To Potami (a new centrist party) and from SYRIZA but I don't believe that for a second, especially when it comes to SYRIZA -- to those PASOK voters who defected to SYRIZA, Papandreou is Public Enemy Number One.

In terms of political stability, strangely enough, this might actually prove to be good news. The Greek electoral law is made in such a way that small parties failing to reach the 3% threshold benefits the party that garners the largest number of votes (I'll post about the electoral law in detail over the weekend.) So splitting the PASOK vote between two parties means that SYRIZA has a better chance of securing an absolute majority in parliament if they both fail to reach 3%.

EDIT: I forgot the funniest bit of it all. Papandreou's party is called "Movement for change." And this comes from someone whose father and grandfather were prime ministers before him.

 

Yikes, ten days already? I badly neglected this thread. Here are some bits and pieces about what's been happening and what is coming up, but since this is quite long I'll post straight away the tl;dr version: a messed-up election is taking place in a messed-up country. Business as usual and SYRIZA will win.

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The Greek electoral system in brief.

The Greek parliament has 300 MPs. Of these, 12 are elected on a nationwide ballot and the remaining 288 are elected in electoral constituencies. The constituencies match the nomoi (districts) of Greece, except for the two largest districts, Attica and Thessaloniki, which are broken down into smaller constituencies (5 in the case of Attica and 2 in the case of Thessaloniki.) In order to elect MPs to parliament, a party must garner at least 3% of the vote nationwide.

This means that, as a voter, when you go and vote, you choose the party you vote for and you may, but don't have to, tick on the ballot a certain number of names, up to the number of MPs that your constituency will elect based on its size. Your vote thus contributes to three parameters:

• It contributes to your party reaching the 3% threshold and to electing one or more of the 12 nationwide MPs,
• It contributes to your party's share of the vote in your voting district and thus determines how seats in your district are allocated by party,
• It contributes to electing those people you ticked to one of the seats that your party will win.

Furthermore, the electoral system in Greece is what is called in Greek "reinforced proportional" (I'm too lazy to look up the correct term in English right now). This means that 250 MP seats are allocated on a strictly proportional basis to the parties entering parliament, while the last 50 seats are a bonus for the party that garners the largest number of votes. This was put in place some 20 years ago to ensure that the leading party has an absolute majority in parliament (151 seats) and can thus form a government. However, the political landscape in Greece right now is so fragmented that even a 50-seat bonus out of 300 isn't enough, and that's what led New Democracy and PASOK to form a coalition government in 2012. The big question right now is to know if any party can garner a sufficient number of votes to secure a majority.

One important parameter for this is the number of votes that will go to parties that don't reach the 3% threshold. There's a complicated equation for this, but put simply, the larger the number of voters that end up not being represented in parliament, the smaller the percentage of the vote the lead party needs in order to secure 151 seats. I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but in the May 2012 elections for instance, because such a large number of people voted for small parties that didn't make 3%, the lead party could have secured 151 seats with something in the vicinity of 32-33% of the vote.

All in all, it's a rather unfair and problematic system, and SYRIZA have promised to modify it if and when they are elected to power, but I can't say I'm really holding my breath about that.
Another, very important problem right now is the voters' lists. There's the chronic issue of keeping them up to date for deaths -- as a lawyer, I get to sit on an electoral commission for virtually every election, and you'd be amazed at the number of registered voters born in 1910 we have in this country -- but that doesn't really matter for the results, unless of course some of these dead people vote, and I'm pretty sure some do, albeit not in such numbers that it would influence the result. But the main problem right now is people turning 18 in 2015 and Greeks who live abroad.

In Greece you acquire the right to vote from January 1st of the year when you turn 18 (meaning that if you were born on 31 December 1998, you're supposed to be voting in the upcoming elections, even though you're only 17). However, the Ministry of Interior adds new voters to the registers in February of each year. Since the upcoming election will take place on 25 January, well, that leaves approx 100,000 young people out -- and since young people vote overwhelmingly for SYRIZA, that will definitely have an impact on the result. If there's no majority in parliament, there will be a repeat election and then they will get to vote.

As for Greeks who live abroad, the problem is that you can't vote in your embassy or by post or by proxy. You have to be there yourself in the place where you're registered to vote, and that could be a tiny village on some remote island. This is a problem even for people who live in Greece, because many of us are registered in our place of origin (i.e. the tiny village) instead of our place of residence, and transferring your voting rights is a bureaucratic nightmare. But for Greeks living abroad -- and that's a lot of people -- the problem is even bigger, because travelling from, say, Canada to a remote island is not only time-consuming, it's also awfully expensive. Now I'm not really hung up on third-generation Canadian Greeks exercising their right to vote, and they're probably not too interested either, but there has been a massive wave of emigration from Greece in recent years due to the crisis, possibly up to half a million people. Here again, it's mostly young people, and if the results of the 2014 European elections are anything to go by a majority of them are SYRIZA voters.

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Tidbits of news since 2 January

On Saturday 3 January, the four biggest names in Greek politics today gave campaign speeches. Tsipras (SYRIZA) spoke in a stadium. Samaras (New Democracy) spoke in a hotel conference room. Venizelos (PASOK) spoke in a café. Papandreou (hos own man now) spoke in a museum. I don't think that he even understands the irony of that.

A couple days later, New Democracy fired their campaign director because the videos from Samaras's speech in the hotel clearly showed that there weren't so many people there. They now hired a new campaign director who knows how to film a small assembly and make it look big. SYRIZA don't have that problem -- yesterday Tsipras spoke in Corinth, which is a very conservative city, and a friend who was there told me the rally was packed.

Papandreou changed his mind about the name of his new party. It's finally not "Movement for change", it's "Movement of Democrat Socialists." Whatever.

Opinion polls are all over the place. Yesterday 7 opinion polls were published (seven in a country of 10 million people!) and they give SYRIZA anything between 2 and 8% ahead of New Democracy. It's impossible to make sense of what all these polls mean, and some of them are probably entirely bogus, but the pollster who says SYRIZA is 8% ahead of New Democracy has a very good track record. If he's right then SYRIZA are securing the 151 seats.

The candidate lists have been mostly finalised. 26 parties or coalitions of parties will field candidates but no more than 6 are anticipated to enter parliament (the most fragmented parliament we ever elected was in May 2012, and that was 7 parties). I'm curious to see if PASOK will even enter parliament, given how Papandreou will siphon away part of their voters. Interestingly, a few prominent former PASOK members defected to New Democracy last week, and the only reason I can see for that is that they feel they can't count on PASOK to reach the required 3% of the vote.

Lastly, Samaras made some pretty obnoxious comments on the Charlie Hebdo killings, trying to use the issue to reinforce his xenophobic rhetoric about immigrants. I don't feel like writing about that because it's just too disgusting, but you can read more in English here and here.

 

Thanks Darth Punk

I'd say that the two most reliable Greek pollsters are Public Issue and VPRC (as far as I know only PI have a website where they actually publish their polls http://www.publicissue.gr/, unfortunately most of it is in Greek). Both have a reasonably good track record with elections in recent years. However, you can't really trust polls conducted by private pollsters because they have a history of being manipulated to "create impressions" and recent changes in legislation pertaining to polls is making this even worse. Add to it that the Greek political landscape is undergoing cosmogonic changes, so even good pollsters add a giant health warning to their polls saying "this is our best guess, don't be too hard on us if we didn't get it right."

Sometimes universities conduct polls independently, and those are usually very, very good, but now their budgets have been cut down so badly that it doesn't happen very often.

Polls are usually published in the Sunday papers, so I'll save next week's for you and post about it here, but honestly, don't hold your breath about ND making a comeback. It would take nothing less than a tsunami, a nuclear accident and a Turkish plane flying into the Acropolis for that (that's my humble opinion of course and I've been wrong in the past.) I really think that the question right now isn't whether SYRIZA will be elected, it's whether they will be elected with a sufficient majority to form a government.

 

lmao does it make you feel awkward that foreign futures traders are now praying for a turkish plane to hit the acropolis, chyntuck?

 

Meh. The Turks wouldn't be interested anyway.

 

The Greek Ombudsman contacted the acting Minister of Interior today to propose two different solutions to amend the existing electoral law in order to include youth turning 18 in 2015 on the voters' lists. She said that failing to do so would be a violation of their rights and that it's legally as well as technically feasible, as it just requires municipalities to transfer the list of names from their databases to the Interior Ministry database. Her statement is the sort of formal thing that you expect from someone in her position, but it clearly implies that she thinks the government are keeping 18-year-olds off the voters' lists on purpose.

Yiannis Mavris (the Public Issue chief pollster) published an analysis titled "Why New Democracy will lose the elections" on his personal website. Unfortunately it's only available in Greek right now, so here's a summary:

• SYRIZA has a definite advantage because it has gathered a lot of the anti-austerity vote regardless of ideology. Meanwhile, the "centre-left" (for lack of a better word) is increasingly fragmented and voters are abandoning ND and moving on to SYRIZA as a protest vote.
• SYRIZA gained momentum with the 2014 European elections, and all indicators indicate an evolution similar to what happened between European and national elections in 2009 (PASOK then won in a landslide).
• Four key issues are: 1) the economic situation of households is still deteriorating, 2) voters were never positive about austerity and now they oppose it ever more fiercely, 3) the vast majority of public opinion believes that the national debt must be renegotiated (which SYRIZA supports but ND opposes), 4) government propaganda and fear-mongering aren't working anymore because the number of people who fear default is decreasing all the time.

(I'll check again in a few days to see if he posted an English translation, he usually does.)

 

New Democracy's new campaign TV spot, shamelessly exploiting the Charlie Hebdo story:



It says: "At the very moment when Europe is shielding itself, SYRIZA is proposing to disarm the police, to shut down high-security prisons against terrorists and to abolish the rules for naturalization. The truth is that SYRIZA wants Greece to be defenseless, and the police to be weaponless and unable to protect the citizens. For New Democracy, the Greek people's security is non-negotiable."

Also, SYRIZA announced a Twitter chat with Tsipras tomorrow with this poster:



... and a New Democracy candidate came up with an open letter calling it "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit."

This comes of course on the same day Samaras gave a speech in which he renewed his commitment that, as long as New Democracy is in power, there will be religious icons in public buildings (schools, hospitals, town halls) but that if SYRIZA come to power they'll remove them (and then I assume we'll be burning in hell forever or something along those lines.)

I may be wrong but my feeling is that ND realised that the "we'll default and leave the Euro" rhetoric isn't working, so they're switching to the basest, most despicable nationalist/conservative tactics.

EDIT: I just saw that ND's first TV spot has been subbed in English (here). And you know what's missing from it? Yeah, women. Because football and politics are men's business, I guess.

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On the funnier side of the campaign, ANEL (Independent Greeks), a populist-nationalist anti-austerity offshot of New Democracy, came up with this gem (the fat guy is ANEL chairman Panos Kammenos):



Noticed how the little boy is called Alexis? Like (future SYRIZA prime minister) Tsipras? Okay, watch it again now, and if you don't die laughing I'll explain it to you again.

 

what a ****show

 

Welcome to my world.

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The piece by Yiannis Mavris that I mentioned two days ago is available in English: Why New Democracy will lose the elections.

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And since I lampooned right-wing electoral spots yesterday, for the sake of fairness let's have fun at SYRIZA's expense today. The English subs were added by SYRIZA themselves.



As you can see, everyone in this country seems to enjoy their little personality cult. In the Greek version of the same video, instead of "Hope is on the way", it says "The future has a name" and then the SYRIZA logo appears. It's supposed to mean future = SYRIZA, but the message I got was future = Tsipras. Okay then.

 

Slices of life from Athens today.

Conversation at the newspaper kiosk -- Customer: "Do you buy that BS that if SYRIZA is elected banks will go bust and we'll lose our savings?" -- Kiosk owner: "My savings in the bank are €30. It's okay, they can have them."

Conversation with a cabbie -- Him: "Let's see what will happen with the elections." -- Me: "Did you decide who you'll vote for?" -- Him: "SYRIZA of course. The other guys sat for exams and they failed abysmally."

Conversation in the office -- My colleagues are talking about the Grexit fear-mongering when the guy who delivers coffees walks in and says: "Someone who's already drenched doesn't fear the rain."

And my favourite, the sign posted on my neighbourhood bakery's door:

 

Darth Punk You want to see this: Goldman Sachs Voting Model Shows Samaras May Confound Pollsters. I'd be extremely curious to know where this so-called analysts saw "improving wages" and "declining unemployment" in Greece though

 

A new batch of opinion polls was released over the weekend. As I said in previous posts, they're not very reliable, but the trend is that SYRIZA is 3-5 percentage points ahead of New Democracy, without however reaching such a score that they would secure an outright majority in parliament.

What is very confusing is the number of people stating that they'll vote for smaller parties. Figures vary wildly from one poll to the next and it's really a mystery which ones of those parties will even make it to parliament. I had dinner with a group of friends who are politically aware people last night and the differences in our predictions as to what will happen are very revealing of how confusing the whole situation is. Half of us expect Golden Dawn to garner a much, much larger portion of the vote than what polls say, while the other half don't even believe they'll reach the minimum threshold to enter parliament. About PASOK and the Papandreou splinter group, our opinions were all over the place -- some expect both parties to enter parliament, some none, some only one or the other. (Political) life was much easier at the time when we knew that either PASOK or ND would be elected with a straight majority and everything else was a sideshow